The Santa Cruz Operation Inc says that 70% of Unix licence shippers, by which it means itself, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Digital Equipment Corp, have no intention of adopting Novell Inc’s UnixWare because it doesn’t fit into their strategy. UnixWare has been endorsed by Unisys Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and Dell Computer Corp, but Santa Cruz declared Novell would like the OEM customers to drop their own versions of Unix, but it realistically won’t happen as in most cases, it is hard just to take binary and slip it out of the door – everyone, of course, tweaks their OEM products to differentiate them and make them suitable for their own markets. Furthermore, despite Novell’s attempts at making UnixWare an industry standard, first by slashing prices, and then by using its not insubstantial influence to get the Unix vendors rallying round, few licences have actually been sold in Europe, Santa Cruz attests, whereas it has seen its own European business grow by more than 30% over the past year. This is because UnixWare is immature, lacks applications, device drivers for personal computers and a skills distribution channel. On the other hand, Santa Cruz says, it is committed to adopting the common Unix application programming interfaces and wants Novell to do the same rather than confuse the market on a product issue.
